Great to have a letter published on the vocational experiences of young adults with juvenile idiopathic arthritis.

For those with a lifetime of work ahead of them this work examines the support and planning guidance provided in finding the right first job. Better support is clearly needed for young people with rheumatic conditions to improve transition outcomes from education to work. More information here!

We are very excited to announce that we have led a successful collaborative application to renew the National Centre of Excellence for Musculoskeletal Health and Work for a further five years (October 2019 – September 2024)!

Versus Arthritis and the Medical Research Council have awarded us £2.2 million to continue discovering and developing cost-effective ways to reduce the burden of work disability caused by musculoskeletal conditions. These include low back pain, osteoarthritis, inflammatory arthritis, gout and rarer conditions such as lupus, which cost an estimated 30.6 million working days to be lost each year.

Well done to everyone in the team! – we’re looking forward to continuing our collaborations and work in this very important area.

Her lecture entitled “Musculoskeletal disorders and work in the 21st Century: what do we know, what do we need to know and what would Charles Turner Thackrah tell us?” was very well received! pic.twitter.com/y52zUPijPw

Find us in Building 40 with our ‘Measure Muscle and Helping Hands’ activities.

Our ‘Measure Muscle’ activity will measure and plot your grip strength to show how muscle strength changes with age, and what we can do to try and stay healthy and active. In ‘Helping Hands’ you can test your fine movement skills against the clock, experience the difference that an illness or injury might make and see how your results compare with others across age-ranges.

We’ll post the graphs of our findings here after the event. Hope to see you there!

Our Director, Professor Karen Walker-Bone, advocates a holistic approach to managing musculoskeletal problems in the workplace – in the latest Financial Times Special Report on Health at Work (17th January 2019).

Well done to Lisa Newington (one of our PhD students) on not only getting her systematic review on “Sickness absence after carpal tunnel release” published in the Scandinavian Journal of Work Environment and Health this month, but with an editorial based on her paper in the same issue. A great achievement!